


Remembering Color

by jaytodds



Series: Obikin Soulmate AUs [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 20:58:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6209890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaytodds/pseuds/jaytodds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The years came and went, each bringing more wonder than the last - he could see why love was so coveted. The vibrancy of the planets they visited, gilded dunes, emerald valleys, the sapphire sky – nothing could compare to the riches Obi-Wan now beheld. Anakin’s face was the brightest by far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remembering Color

When Obi-Wan met his master for the first time, the world suddenly gained a whisper of color. The shades of grey became muted reds and greens and the sun cast a warm golden light across everything it touched. He had believed that this was it, his soul mate, the one he was destined to spend the rest of his life with – in color. Everything had seemed so bright; when Qui-Gon Jinn was around him, the colors swelled. Obi-Wan knew he could never go back to the dullness, the emptiness of a black and grey world. A world without love. The two were a pair unlike any other the Jedi order had ever seen, and it showed in the deep connection the two knights shared on the battlefield as well as in the training center.

The abruptness of grey, although only a slight shift from what he’d had before, was a sucker punch to the gut. Obi-Wan felt the breath leave his lungs in the same gust that swept the color from his eyes at the moment of Qui-Gon’s death. He saw the memory of red like a sun-faded photograph as he landed blow after blow on Darth Maul’s dual-bladed saber. When the Sith apprentice was dead, Obi-Wan only wished for the rage to return so that maybe the idea of color could come back to him. Maybe his master could come back to him.

The second he laid eyes upon the Skywalker boy, Obi-Wan was assaulted. The colors he saw were like nothing he’d ever before experienced, not even in Qui-Gon’s arms. He could see each individual freckle on the boy’s face, every strand of golden hair, every fleck of blue-green-silver in the child’s steely eyes. Nothing had ever been so vivid. He was blinded and he saw his own look of shock mirrored on the youngling’s face. It was fate.

The prophecy weighed Anakin down in the eyes of the Jedi council, he was too brash, to uncontrollable. He could be a knight, but never a member, and it hurt. Obi-Wan could see the crimson in his clenched fists and the deep blue in his pleading lips. The council saw only grey.

The years came and went, each bringing more wonder than the last - he could see why love was so coveted. The vibrancy of the planets they visited, gilded dunes, emerald valleys, the sapphire sky – nothing could compare to the riches Obi-Wan now beheld. Anakin’s face was the brightest by far.

Oh, but the horrors of the battlefield. Obi-Wan never knew that blood was so red. He never knew that one could see the life drain so literally from another’s body, and with this newfound sight, he could see every ounce of pain that dripped from the veins of his men. He saw the yellow fogs of an alien planet engulf his squadron, and while he stood crippled by the fear instilled by the very air he breathed, the men around him killed each other. All he could see was grey; the world was grey, his shaking hands were grey. All he remembers now is sinking to the ground in despair and waking up on his ship, cradled in Anakin’s arms, staring bleary-eyed into the azure-jade-steel of his eyes. He’d never felt such relief.

But here they are now, standing on the precipice of a molten gorge, the swirling magma matching Anakin’s red-rimmed eyes. The colors seem so out of place now. Like they shouldn’t belong where they are – the cerulean of his friend’s lightsaber inches from his throat, the flaxen sheen of Anakin’s hair matted in clumps to his perspiring forehead, the inflamed hatred raging in his eyes. When Obi-Wan takes his legs, he sees confusion on Anakin’s face, then pain. Fire snakes up his body, licking yellow at his flesh.

“You were my brother.” Obi-Wan wonders what made his lover falter. He sees so little of the boy he used to know, the man he had loved so deeply it ached. What little is left – his loyalty, his passion, his eagerness to please – were desecrated by the Dark Side and the Jedi Master can’t bear to look. “Anakin, I _loved_ you!” His pleading cry is swallowed by the roar of the planet heaving beneath him, but not before reaching Anakin’s ears.

“I hate you!” The younger man’s crazed snarl hits Obi-Wan like a sucker punch to the gut. The feeling he’d dreaded for years washes over him like a wave, suffocating him in grey. The body before him is grey. His trembling hands are grey. The world surrounding him is as grey as smog in an overcast sky on Coruscant.

 

Luke and Leia are grey when Obi-Wan meets them, holds them. Padme’s face is grey in death, and her funeral procession is stone. The desert planet of Tatooine is endless dunes of grey and the sky above him is steel. When Ben Kenobi sees Luke again for the first time since landing here, the boy’s face is flushed with the barest tinge of pink. His eyes flash the slightest hint of blue-green-silver. His hair in the sunlight shows a trace of gold. Ben Kenobi sees Anakin in the boy, and for a moment, remembers the feeling of color.


End file.
